Davos Days

A letter in response to Nick Paumgarten’s article (March 5, 2012)

Nick Paumgarten offers both the most amusing and the most alarming view of our economic present that I’ve read in a long time (“Magic Mountain,” March 5th). Even for those who are not among the economically disadvantaged—such as the former chairman of Morgan Stanley’s Asian operations who was shooed off the stage by the “Occupiers” at Davos, or the architect who lost much of his savings in the financial crisis, and carries a cartoon depicting a woman in a fur coat saying, “There are so many sessions, I can’t decide between ‘hunger’ and ‘poverty’ ”—this is indeed a strange and fragile economic world. But if an astrophysicist and a software executive can learn something from each other, then it is worth travelling across the world and into the human mob at the World Economic Forum to do so. And if a French monk who spends three months a year in silent isolation, and who in his “uptime” oversees a hundred and ten humanitarian projects, is known as “the happiest person in the world,” then there is something to encourage us in such a climate after all.

Sandra Eisdorfer

Chapel Hill, N.C.

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